Effective teaching and learning of population ecology requires integration of quantitative literacy skills. To facilitate student learning in population ecology and provide students with the opportunity to develop and apply quantitative skills, we designed a clicker-based lesson in which students investigate how ecologists measure and model population size. This lesson asks students to "engage like scientists" as they make predictions, plot data, perform calculations, and evaluate evidence. The lesson was taught in three sections of a large enrollment undergraduate class and assessed using a pre/post-test, in-class clicker-based questions, and multiple-choice exam questions. Student performance increased following peer discussion of clicker questions and on post-test questions. Students also performed well on the end-of-unit exam questions.

Ebola, Zika, the recall of contaminated lettuce - these are just a few recent outbreaks making headlines. Students should be able to connect what they learn in their biology courses to explain these events happening around them. Unfortunately, students do not necessarily make those connections. Therefore, it is important, as instructors, to provide opportunities where students engage with societal issues and problems related to course content and case studies, using headlines from the news are one way to do this.

Here I describe a case study about Lyme disease that engages students in learning about the ecology of infectious disease. Lyme disease incidence has tripled in the last 15 years and is estimated to affect 300,000 Americans annually. This lesson uses an NPR news audio clip containing interviews with two disease ecologists, Rick Ostfeld and Felicia Keesing, who describe predicting Lyme disease incidence by measuring mice populations. The activities in this lesson explore factors that led to the recent surge in Lyme disease. In small collaborative groups, students analyze data figures from publications by the Ostfeld and Keesing labs (along with others) to construct an understanding of the ecology of Lyme disease and predict how changes to the ecosystem could affect Lyme disease incidence. This case study lesson could be relevant to those teaching microbiology, ecology, public health or biology for majors.

My class used Water Balance of a Tree (Unit 5.1) to begin quantifying the fundamental pathways for water movement within a forest. The ultimate goal was to model transpiration of the redwood forest on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

In this lab, students will work with a simple algae/brine shrimp environment to learn about food chains and population dynamics. It was implemented with limited alteration for an Introductory Ecology course.

Step-by-step, hands-on instruction on ways to access and download these specimen data, how to process climate layer data, and how to apply Maxent software to construct ecological niche models.

University capstone projects can offer science students a rich research experience that illustrates the process of doing scientific research, and can also help students better choose future academic and career pathways. While capstone projects are an effective component of students' learning in the sciences, they are resource and labor intensive for supervising faculty and are not always logistically feasible in understaffed and/or under-resourced departments and colleges. A good compromise is to incorporate a significant research component into upper division classes. This article documents a project I have incorporated into a plant ecology course that I teach every spring. This project gives students a taste of what practicing ecologists do in their professional lives. Students learn how to survey vegetation and environmental factors in the field, apply several statistical analysis techniques, formulate testable hypotheses relevant to a local plant community, analyze a large shared data set, and communicate their findings both in writing and in a public presentation. Over the weeks required for this project, students learn that doing science is quite different from how they typically learn about science. Most say that, while this project is one of the hardest they have completed in their time in university, they appreciate being treated like a fellow scientist rather than as "just a student." Additionally, students' findings often reveal complex and subtle interactions in the plant community sampled, providing further insight to and examples of emergent properties of biological communities.

Link to Populus Software

Module for Ecology & Evolution course covering island biogeography principles, The scientific process and hypothesis testing, statistical methods (t-tests, regression), and online database use and availability